Help Yourself.

You may have already read Entertainment Weekly's piece by Martha Southgate on The Help, in which she calls out the publishing industry and Hollywood for their "continued impulse to reduce the black women and men of the civil rights movement to bit players in the most extraordinary step toward justice that this nation has ever known."

You may have read Jennifer Williams' piece in Ms., which reminds readers that The Help's so-called "untold story" of black domestic workers' difficultie in a racist society has actually been amply explored by such black women writers as Ann Petry, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica Kincaid.  Williams calls The Help

the perfect summer escape for viewers who embrace the fantasy of a postracial America. Those filmgoers can tuck the history of race and class inequality safely in the past, even as the recession deepens already profound racial gaps in wealth and employment.

You may have even read the open statement by the Association of Black Women Historians:  "We do not recognize the black community described in The Help. . . .":

. . . The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism. . . . The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own.

My favorite line from their statement calls the book/film "troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it."

And apparently there's nostalgia aplenty, which has not hurt author Kathryn Stockett.  She's just become "the first debut novelist to join the Million Club," selling over a million paid copies of her book on Kindle, and I think I heard that it's already sold upward of 3 million copies in hardcover and paperback.

You may have read Matt Zoller Seitz's piece, "Why Hollywood Keeps Whitewashing the Past," which calls The Help
 

a college-educated white liberal's wish-fulfillment fantasy of how she would have conducted herself had she been time-warped back to the civil rights era.  I wouldn't have just stood by and let it happen. I would have done something! Something brave!

And you might already know about Nelson George's criticism of The Help for its "false sense of authenticity" and its "candy-coated cinematography," which "buffers viewers from the era's violence."

You may have seen how Latina magazine jumped on The Help's bandwagon with its little featurette about "our favorite Latina 'help' roles of all-time!"--and the response by Latina Fatale, "Shame on Latina Magazine!"

But my very favorite so far might be what Roxane Gay says in her piece "The Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances from 1960s Mississippi:  Thoughts on The Help."  Gay sees The Help as "science fiction, creating an alternate universe to the one we live in."

Sigh.  Science fiction.  An alternate universe.  Cowboys & Aliens.  Why are mass audiences loving these visions right now?   

Several of my women's studies and ethnic studies professor-friends have seen the film lately, and I'm hoping they're going to weigh in about all of this here on the blog at some point.  (At UNL, there are also tentative plans to host a panel about the issues the book/film raises.  More on that later for local readers.)

In the meantime, to well-meaning nostalgic sci-fi fans of a postracial fantasy world:  You is kind, you is smart, you is important.  But have you ever read The Bluest Eye?